Together in Electric Dreams - Background

Background

The film Electric Dreams was to be director Steve Barron's first full feature film. Previously Barron had made a name for himself conceiving and directing a number of innovative music videos during the early 1980s. His biggest success had been directing the music video for The Human League's "Don't You Want Me" in 1981 which helped the single become number one in the UK and U.S.

For the film Electric Dreams Barron wanted to emulate the huge success of the film Flashdance a year earlier. Flashdance had used the electronic music of Giorgio Moroder, so Barron enlisted Moroder as director of music, who wrote most of the score. Barron wanted the end credits to roll to "an emotional" song in the same way as Flashdance had done.

Moroder wrote "Together in Electric Dreams" which was to be a male solo vocal, when he asked who Barron would like to sing the lyrics, Barron immediately thought of his former associate Philip Oakey.

When Oakey recorded the song it was over very quickly, after the first full recording Moroder told Oakey that the first take was "good enough, as first time is always best". Oakey who thought he was just rehearsing insisted on doing another take. Moroder let him but to this day Oakey is convinced that Moroder still used the first take on the final production. Originally released to advertise the film, "Together in Electric Dreams" quickly overshadowed the original film and became a hit single in its own right.

Oakey states that it is ironic that a track that took literally ten minutes to record would become a worldwide hit, while some of his Human League material that took over a year to record didn't.